| Description |
vii, 244 pages : illustrations, music ; 24 cm |
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Gender group: gdr Men |
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Nationality/regional group: nat Americans |
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Occupational/field of activity group: occ University and college faculty members |
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Occupational/field of activity group: occ Musicologists |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-239) and index. |
| Contents |
Prelude -- Sound and knowledge -- Audiable : an introduction -- Some leitmotifs -- Standard of vision -- A philosophy of listening? -- Constructive description -- Sight, sound, and language -- Sound of words -- Seeing, saying, and hearing -- Audiable : variations on a theme -- Music in the air -- "No sound without music" -- Language and the human -- Lord Bacon's echoes -- Ripple effects : distant voices -- Infinite broadcast -- Immanence -- Reading transfigured : St. Augustine -- To the life : the image -- Moving pictures -- Modern times: the cartoon -- Sound of meaning -- Music and the audiable : a suite in three movements -- Plato's singing school -- Musical synesthesia -- Music of language -- Soundscape -- Song -- Noise and silence -- Fish, flesh, or fowl -- Sensory hybrids -- "Waiting to be the music" -- Circle songs -- Forty-part motets -- Ether -- Elemental media -- Elemental fluids -- Writing the soundscape -- Haunting melodies -- Lifelike : the undead -- Beyond words? -- Audiable and the audible -- Into silence -- Enchantments of the name -- Inaudible -- On saying "I am" -- Shriek -- Metal -- Here comes that song again -- Mirror of silence -- Rhythmic hearing -- Media all the way down -- Auditory window -- Cacophony : dispossession (Beckett) -- Euphony : repossession (Beckett) -- Worldly dissonance -- Sounds of battle : the Civil War -- Sounds of battle : World War I -- Ulysses in Auschwitz -- Intermezzo -- Sounding bodies -- Pandemonium? -- Songs of entropy -- By hand -- Past and present -- Consciousness. |
| Summary |
The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas with playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquire tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable, without it. Lawrence Kramer's poetic book roves freely over music, media, language, philosophy, and science from the ancient world to the present, along the way revealing how life is apprehended through sounds ranging from pandemonium to the faint background hum of the world. Easily moving from reflections on pivotal texts and music to the introduction of elemental concepts, this warm meditation on auditory culture uncovers the knowledge and pleasure made available when we recognize that the world is alive with sound. |
| Subject |
Sounds -- Philosophy.
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Sounds. |
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Philosophy. |
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Sounds -- Social aspects.
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Social aspects. |
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Music -- Philosophy and aesthetics.
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Music -- Philosophy and aesthetics. |
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Language and languages -- Philosophy.
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Language and languages -- Philosophy. |
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Hören. |
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Klang. |
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Philosophie. |
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Wahrnehmung. |
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Sounds -- Philosophy. |
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Sounds -- Social aspects. |
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Music -- Philosophy and aesthetics. |
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Language and languages -- Philosophy. |
| Other Form: |
Online version: Kramer, Lawrence, 1946- author. Hum of the world Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] 9780520972728 (DLC) 2019000067 |
| ISBN |
9780520303492 hardcover alkaline paper |
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0520303490 hardcover alkaline paper |
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9780520972728 e-edition hardback |
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0520972724 |
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